Letter from Ireland, pt. 6
(A certain resentment has become entrenched in my character and, on reflection, I think I'll keep it.)
In the particular instance of the finicky guest, I'll keep it for definite reasons. This guest is trying to co-opt me, to get me to admit and agree to their aspersions. I am still really American, right? I must think and act as they do. They want me to collaborate against Ireland. They either assume I will collaborate with them in putting Ireland down, or they are prodding me, suspicious of how far gone I am. I think of gangster movies where the crooks force the dupe to prove his loyalty by shooting his brother. Actually, I feel akin to a colonial governor hosting an official visit. The visitor grows in suspicion until he is certain: the governor has gone native! I am made to feel defensive about what I am doing and who I’ve become (or perhaps, who I am pretending to be.)
There is a degree of hostility in such suspicion. Anyone might be forgiven for feeling that there’s no place like home. For Americans, the attitude resembles religious conviction. Classic Yankee dogma. The degree of conviction is matched only by the ignorance regarding the rest of the world. The most assured and patriotic visitors I have had are the ones who have hardly been out of the state of Massachusetts, never mind the United States, and are smugly ignorant of a wider world.
America is a vast land that dreams of itself. It is self-sufficient. It does not need the rest of the world, so to speak, and it has always been thus. Despite the growth of the U.S. into a superpower, the desire for isolation has been a norm and not an exception. Foreign involvement is viewed as an evil necessary for prosperous trade. One suspects this attitude even of some of the men who have steered the country into foreign waters. If the rest of the world could keep its act together and get on with matters of economy, the U.S. would too happily disappear from foreign affairs altogether.
Most citizens of America live as if this were already the case. They live in blissful ignorance. The entire world need have no relevance at all for the average American citizen. This is as true for east coast cities like Boston that supposedly dream of the Old World, as it is for the heartland. America is the New World. (Isn't this really the single most annoying fact to foreigners: Yes, some Americans are ignorant, and they can be.) A land where a cross-country trip can be the event of a lifetime. A land where a car passenger falls asleep driving through Texas, and awakens five hours later to find he is still in Texas, with New Mexico yet before him. It is Kerouac's America, with all those roads going, spreading behind him from that Jersey river-front pier, and dreaming in the immensity of itself.
America often has been successfully self-absorbed. Let a few select individuals dirty their hands with foreign matters--that's why we voted for them. The rest can get on with the American Experience.
In summation, that's all I want. To get on with mine.
posted by Borderliner at 9:49 AM
2 Comments:
This piece of the letter houses some very familiar attitudes. I have heard the comment about American isolationism before, but it had come from German mouths. There is, or at least was then, an attempt to categorize Americans as unsophisticated in the ways of the world, and therefore less cultured and worthy to be citizens of the world. The Europeans had a vested interest in "othering" Americans as a way of reclaiming not just the loss of political and economic clout, but also the loss of their monopoly on culture. I have had a French woman tell me that American music stemmed from black African music, and that American fashion grew from the working class assuming that trends could be more than fads. She said this as if to discredit American music by casting it "down" with African culture. She was perplexed when I was not offended, but was proud. I could not attribute her bias to the homogeneity of her society because she was French- they have a very heterogeneous society.
I have also seen, first hand, the described machinations of the American assuming collusion with his perspective of things not American necessarily "less than" things American. Perhaps every culture "others" the competition in order to justify the cultural violence inherent in the battle for hegemony in the minds of the nonaligned world. This is, incidentally, what makes Americans who they are to a great degree. What exists in a person's mind decides whether or not she is American- we can become Americans by subscribing to the secular creeds codified by the Age of Enlightenment thinkers, the founding fathers, in the same way that a non-Muslim can become a Muslim by iterating Islam's core belief. No one is more zealous than a convert, and you will find that immigrants are the most rabidly American of the Americans. I got off point here a bit (but hey, who cares); my offering is that I understand the post and agree that it happens, but neither condone nor decry its content. How's that for fence sitting?
Well said, dammit.
I think your French insights are hilarious when you consider that the French are particular digesters of African-American culture. Thhink Jazz and Josephine Baker.
But in all honesty, who cares about the French, eh? They also like Poe's poetry, go figure. Maybe it gains in the translation.
Of course, America is a state of mind. I agree one hundred percent. In that respect I am fairly rabidly American. In this instance, the perspective of the Outsider occasionally leads me to disgust over the relative ignorance and laziness in which many Americans indulge when it comes to their civic and intellectual history, as well as their political choices. But hey, this isn't a political blog. :-|
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